A conventional practice is to impregnate one or more drops of fluid to be examined onto a sample carrier, dry the sample carrier impregnated with the fluid, and then send the sample carrier to a laboratory for examination. The fluid to be examined can be, for example, blood of a newborn baby and the sample carrier can be, for example, a sheet of filter paper or some other suitable porous material which is able to absorb the fluid to be examined. In the laboratory, one or more regions containing the fluid to be examined, i.e. one or more sample regions, are cut off from the sample carrier and the one or more pieces that have been cut off are conveyed, for further analysis, to one or more sample wells of e.g. a microtitration plate or some other sample well element. Each sample region can be cut off from the sample carrier for example with a punch and a die provided with a channel for the punch, where the punch is arranged to cut off the sample region with a single stroke through the sample carrier. It is also possible to use a cutting instrument capable of producing a localized, point-form cut on the sample carrier and to move the point-form cutting impact produced by the cutting instrument along the outer periphery of each sample region so as to detach the sample region from the sample carrier. The sample well element, e.g. a microtitration plate, can get charged with static electricity when it is handled and it is placed to a device for cutting off the one or more sample regions from the sample carrier. The sample well element can get electrically charged for example when it is removed from its package in the laboratory. The static electricity makes it more challenging to convey the sample regions cut off from the sample carrier to right sample wells of the sample well element because the electrically charged sample well element creates in its surroundings a non-homogenous electrical field that may polarize the sample regions, i.e. the detached pieces of the sample carrier material, and thus electrical forces may be directed to the sample regions.
A device according to the prior art for cutting off one or more sample regions from a sample carrier comprises, in addition to a cutting unit for cutting off the sample regions, means for humidifying air and blowing the humidified air to the surroundings of the sample well element in order to discharge possible static electricity from appropriate parts of the device and/or from the sample regions with the aid of the water carried by the humidified air. In some situations it might be, however, challenging to control the air humidity so that undesirable condensation of water to structures of the device is sufficiently low but, on the other hand, the discharging of the static electricity is effective enough.